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Highway User Fees

By | | Transportation
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The American Petroleum Institute has a web page showing how much of the price you pay for gasoline goes to the government in each state. They include ordinary gas taxes as well as sales taxes on gasoline, but not taxes paid by the oil companies themselves.


Click image to go to the API web site for more detail.

Their goal, I suppose, is to show that the oil companies aren’t making anywhere near as much profit off of gasoline as the government is. But the map also shows some clear geographic differences. First, the lowest taxes are in the sunbelt, while the highest are in ultra-blue states on the coasts and upper Midwest. Second, the range in gas (excise) taxes is quite wide, from 10.5 cents per gallon in New Jersey to 37.5 cents in Washington state.

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Prospects for Mileage-Based User Fees

By | | Transportation
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“We focus on mileage-based user fees as if they are an end, but they are really just a vehicle to an end,” Jack Basso, chair of the Mileage -Based User Fee Alliance, told the audience at what the group hopes will the first of an annual series of conferences. While everyone in the audience could agree with that statement, there was a sharp division over what should be the real purpose of such fees.

For Robert Atkinson, who recently chaired the National Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission, the purpose of such fees is to give transportation users incentives to use the transportation system efficiently and transportation providers incentives to manage it efficiently. Such fees, he pointed out, would make it easy to use congestion pricing to relieve or eliminate the waste of traffic jams. Moreover, creating a “platform” for such fees would allow a variety of new groups to manage roads. Private parties could build and toll roads in congested areas. Neighborhood associations could take over street maintenance.

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